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?I?ve got a war on my hands here,? says Scott Overson of the USDA, referring to the recent plague of crickets in Utah. ?They?re cannibals. They?ll eat anything, including each other.? Just one Mormon cricket can consume up to 38 pounds of forage in its brief life of several months.

Utah Governor Michael O. Leavitt has declared an agricultural emergency to help combat the infestation of crickets and grasshoppers that have affected 1.5 million acres and caused at least $25 million in crop damage.

?We?ll never get rid of them, says Edward J. Bianco, the state?s head entomologist. ?We?ll be fighting them for 200 years. But the ultimate goal now is to control their population to where there is no economic damage to farmers.?
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Four canisters of the deadly nerve gas sarin were discovered at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Colorado. The canisters, each the about the size of a grapefruit, were found in the same scrap pile where six sarin containers were found last fall. These were placed in an a special chamber and destroyed by remote-controlled bombs in January and February.

Officials don?t yet know if the newly-discovered canisters are M-139 bomblets, like the ones found earlier. Each M-139 contains 1.3 pounds of sarin that, when detonated, can kill people up to 900 feet away. The canisters were designed to be delivered as part of a cluster bomb.
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Mars will reach its closest approach to earth of the current opposition on June 21, the summer solstice, the same day that a full solar eclipse takes place in the southern hemisphere. On June 30 Comet Linear C/2001 A2 makes its closest earth approach while breaking up. And there has been a sudden increase in sunspot activity, with the sunspot count reaching close to a record on June 18.

On June 10, the sun, which had been relatively quiet, suddenly blossomed with 250 sunspots. Today, June 18, the count is at 289 and earth is experiencing geomagnetic storm conditions with a G2-class geomagnetic storm under way. Two of the current sunspots, 9503 and 9506, have twisted beta-gamma magnetic fields that could unleash strong M-class solar flares in the next few days.
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The U.S. government has stated that there is no evidence that anyone has had an allergic reaction to genetically modified StarLink corn. The corn has spread throughout the U.S. food supply, despite the fact that it was originally supposed to be kept separate and used only for animal feed. The results of recent tests could clear the way for the EPA to allow small amounts of the corn to be present in food without leading to recalls.

StarLink contains a bacteria gene that permits the corn to produce a protein that kills the corn borer. But the protein has some of the characteristics of an allergen, since it is not easily digested in the human stomach.
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